Reflections on the Ruination in France
The recent spasm of nihilistic violence in France will almost certainly have terrible consequences, including, not least, the election of Marine Le Pen next year. The 1968 U.S. presidential election was close. With George Wallace carrying the Deep South, Richard Nixon and Humbert Humphrey were very close in the popular vote. Public opinion turning against the Vietnam War no doubt helped Nixon, with Humphrey closely associated with President Lyndon Johnson, but Nixon also capitalized on public reaction against the long hot summers of the previous several years. Mayhem in the streets predictably tends to lead to a popular desire for a firm hand.
Most of the French citizens who will cast ballots for Le Pen no doubt like her anti-immigrant views, but there is an ironic, albeit predictable, effect of the violence. To oversimplify greatly, we can identify three broad categories of people who took to the streets in France: (1) students, farmers, workers, and others peacefully protesting the poor state of schools, the high cost of living, and the failure of the Macron government to successfully address those conditions; (2) anarchists and far-left activists who shared the concerns of many in the first group but favor more radically sweeping changes to address them than most of the protesters would support; and (3) people who engaged in violence. That third group itself consisted of three broad sub-groups: (a) members of (1) who got caught up in the moment, perhaps as a result of confrontations with police and gendarmes; (b) members of (2) who either set out to create mayhem or, having a lower threshold for engaging in it, eagerly joined in once matters turned violent; and (c) opportunists who might or might not otherwise be criminals but who took advantage of the chaos to engage in looting and/or vandalism for its own sake.
The French government does not release racial or ethnic data on its arrestees. We do know that the overwhelming majority of the people arrested for the recent unrest are young men. We also know from photographs and more generally that the far-left activists and anarchists tend to be white French folk who favor fewer restrictions on immigration. And yet, the result of their actions and the actions of those who joined in the violence will be a crackdown on immigration and immigrant communities in the coming Le Pen administration. That will be an ironic yet predictable result of the violence.
And that brings me to the title of today's essay--which is obviously a reference to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Despite the prevalence of the term "Burkean conservative," Burke was not a conservative. He was a Whig, not a Tory. He thought societies could and should change but opposed the French Revolution both because of its radical ends and its radical means, more or less correctly predicting the Terror and Bonapartism. Taken beyond the context of the French Revolution, one can see Burke as even more prescient. The substantive extremism Burke associated with the principles of the French Revolution was likewise characteristic of the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, and other movements that sought to wholly remake societies but quickly resulted in totalitarian regimes coming to power and replacing a very bad ançien régime with something far worse. Mass movements of people in the streets can give rise to regimes that disallow all dissent.
But mass movements of people in the streets are also a vital part of a functioning democracy. Moreover, in a flawed democracy teetering on the edge of authoritarianism, and at a time when the executive branch of government is intent on escaping the restraints of the legislature and the courts, mass movements of people in the streets are among the only tools for restraining government abuses. The challenge, then, is for organizers to bring people into the streets but also to maintain discipline among protesters, so that protests do not turn violent and thus give the authoritarians an excuse for a crackdown and a winning electoral hand. That challenge is especially difficult when the authorities (think ICE and other deliberately provocative federal agents under the Trump regime) employ tactics that appear designed to escalate rather than de-escalate.
Given that challenge and the fact that protest organizers can never fully control who shows up without discipline or with their own agenda, the resistance to Trump and Trumpism last winter in Minnesota and at the periodic No Kings protests around the country has been remarkably effective at practicing restraint. One tragic exception involved the 2025 Salt Lake City shooting of a protester by an organizer/peacekeeper who was aiming at another man carrying an AR-15 who, the shooter thought, was going to commit a mass shooting. However, that story says more about the deadly interaction between the First and Second Amendments (about which I wrote here) than it says about the characteristics of the anti-Trump protests in the U.S.
But Americans should resist any temptation to view the chaos in France and the threats of further mayhem in other European countries where demonstrations are occurring as evidence that we are somehow better at peaceful protest. We have our own history of mayhem and of the exploitation of that mayhem by reactionary politicians. The events in Europe are less an occasion to feel superior and more of a potential harbinger of what could lie in store for us.
Michael C. Dorf